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The Garden Variety Girl

Living In The Wings

By DeEtta MillerPublished 3 years ago 6 min read
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To capture a memory, one must go back in time, whether they like it or not. This one, I do not…

The year is vague, the episode of my life is clear, as if frozen in time. To opt to relive past pain may seem foolish if not necessary, but to visit the shadows of one’s life can perhaps help to better understand the why, and how of humanity. I am still in the “head scratching” phase of this quest.

My best guess as to the year my heart and soul were broken publicly is nineteen fifty-seven. I was about seven years old, and in second grade. Such a fragile and tender age to be the lead in a scholastic tragedy. Not unlike Shakespeare’s “Macbeth,” the witch was more powerful than all the little actors around her. Especially the youthful protagonist. But this child was no Lady Macbeth. Just an awkward, shy little girl trying to fit in, yet go un-noticed.

The stage is set. With a cast of five small children, the petite, frail, malnourished mother had virtually no fiscal resources without begging from “the beast.” The little girl was number two of this motley crew. Possessions were tentative at best. Clothes were shared and passed around all the children as if no one owned their own apparel. Sizes of the clothing was irrelevant, as they grabbed for the cleanest and least torn fashion choices available. Safety pins on their clothing were more common than buttons. The pins also helped to adjust the size of the clothing they grabbed. I bet very few people have had to use pins to help keep their oversized underwear from falling down around their knees. It worked nicely, as long as the pin stayed closed. Without a laundry facility, the exhausted Mother did the laundry for her whole family in the bathtub with a washboard. Does anyone even know what a washboard is, in these times of laundry rooms and Laundromats? If the clothing was not dry by school time the next morning, the items where carefully draped over greasy hot oven racks to dry. It was a “win-win,” as the heat from the open oven door helped to warm their cold un-heated house in the winter months.

Another source of heat for the crowded kitchen/laundry room, was several pans of boiling water on the old white electric stove. The water heater had blown out years ago, so hot water for bathing was only accessible by carrying buckets of steaming hot water from the kitchen to the bathroom. A tedious and sometimes dangerous task if you let the water reach the boiling point. Depending on how long you could wait to wash up and wash up was the best you could hope for, cleanliness standards varied. With a long line of siblings banging on the bathroom door, you would skip some of the critical cleanliness rituals. If you were in a hurry, you usually forfeited your place in line altogether.

So, you probably get where I am going with my vivid memories of neglect, and poverty. I was that child from that family. The family on the block that brought down house values the minute we went out the door. The family’s alcoholic Patriarch terrorized the whole block with his rants and threats to beat up every other adult male neighbor within earshot. That was only when he could find time from abusing his own family. The fear caused by the erratic, maniacal drunk posing as a parent of several terrified children alienated us and enraged a neighborhood of “God fearing” residents. Throw in extreme neglect of his physical property and his familial property, and you have US.

It is unlikely anyone could miss how the basic needs of my mother’s children were not met. We were disheveled, and un-kempt, hungry, shy, and hyper vigilant to anything that might pose us even more distress. With a ban on haircuts by our father, our ungroomed hair reached easily to our waists. So hairpulling was always the “go to” for the neighborhood bullies. Some days I felt like a walking target for the bored, and cruel.

But back to second grade. It was the usual day for my tentative and awkward self. Even at seventy-one I can still hear, see, and almost smell the classroom I was delegated to by the educational system. I sat behind another little girl who shared my last name. So, when we were expected to write our name in the upper right-hand corner of our worksheets, I whispered to her, “how do we spell our name?” Coincidentally, she lived right next door to me. So, despite what she must have heard or knew of her “disgusting” next door neighbors, she still discreetly passed a torn sheet of her notebook back to me with the spelling of our name. “Thank you Barb!” JOHNSON, for years I carried that sheet of paper with me everywhere, just in case anyone even cared who I was.

whisper of gratitude was the only sound to reach up to the teacher’s desk. Her head snapped up and she glared as if I had used an expletive, and not a term of gratitude. My body stiffened as I sunk down in the chair of my desk. I lowered my head and pulled my arms around my little body in an effort to become invisible. I was far too fear-based in my demeaner to every create trouble, so this was the first reprimand for me in any place other than home.

Her response to my indiscretion surprised me and made me freeze in place. Instead of reprimanding me on my speaking out of turn, her chastisement was directed at my appearance. No one knew better than I how shabby and un-clean I was most days. Years later I would see that reminder stated in most of my grade school report cards. But to have it shouted at me in front of the entire class brought me to little girl tears. While sobbing during her un-kind relentless inventory of my embarrassing appearance, I could hear the class’s growing laughter. The sentence that still rings in my old lady ears to this day was her last incrimination. “If you’re going to be as dirty as a garden vegetable, go sit under that table, like a carrot!” With a firm grip on my arm, she escorted me to the back of the classroom and had me crawl under a folding table. There I sat the entire day. The discomfort of the hard floor was nothing compared to the giggling and pointing of the other students as they repeatedly passed the table, bending down to poke at and taunt “the dirty carrot.”

I never told Mother what had happened to her little vegetable that day. I had seen how on other occasions when her children were abused, outside the house, she would call a cab and not return till she had confronted whoever had hurt her child. I could not risk her upsetting my teacher. I did not want to return to the garden under the table.

I did not want an encore…

humanity
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About the Creator

DeEtta Miller

Found my "Voice" as a college student of forty-seven. Once a memoir was written, fiction, poetry and non-fiction became my passions.

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